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Reality and delusion in the course of history

THE DRAGONS OF EXPECTATION: Reality and Delusion in the Course of Historyby Robert Conquest

Duckworth £18 pp272

If Robert Conquest’s thought were not so challenging, it would be easy to dismiss him as a colossus from a past age. Born in 1917, he counted Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin among his friends, and won fame as a poet as well as a historian. He traversed the whole political spectrum, joining the Communist party in 1937 and, in the 1980s, writing speeches for Margaret Thatcher. As an intelligence officer during the war he was posted to Bulgaria, and it was watching the post-war Soviet takeover there that disillusioned him with communism. The Great Terror, which he published in 1968, gave a ground-breaking account of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, and was furiously denounced by western intellectuals. He followed it, in 1986, with The Harvest of Sorrow, telling the story of